NonStop Innovations

Subscribe for the Latest NonStop Innovations

About the Author

Mandi Nulph is NuWave Technologies' marketing coordinator. With a degree in Mass Communication and Journalism, she boasts 9 years professional experience writing and editing for a variety of publications, as well as an extensive career in marketing. We welcome your feedback! Please send your comments and questions to mnulph@nuwavetech.com.

Recent Posts

In our first interview of 2017, we had the opportunity to chat with Jessica Nieves, VP of Client Services for OmniPayments, about their latest solutions, the increasing trend towards cloud-based services, and what is next for OmniPayments after their successful Boot Camp presentation.

NuWave: Can you give us a little background on OmniPayments for those who may not be familiar with what you do?

Jessica: We have been around for about 25 year and consider ourselves to be experts in HPE NonStop. Initially, we were Opsol (short for “Open Solutions"), and back then our expertise was open applications for NonStop. We have always been very close to HPE and NonStop because our CEO, Yash Kapadia, was a Tandem developer. Due to his background with the systems, we have a history of working very closely with HPE. We also acquired some development that Yash did while he was working on Tandem. He had been working on a project to develop software that could process transactions for high-performance applications and systems. That development became our base system at OmniPayments.

OmniPayments provides a complete platform that allows financial institutions to acquire, authenticate, route, switch and authorize transactions from a variety of sources like ATMs, POS terminals, kiosks, IVRs and the Internet. OmniPayments consists of several service modules, which is the base of all our products in our suite. Our history and experience with Tandem and HPE has been great in that it has allowed us to grow our products from a very strong base.

Our suite of products was very specialized in the beginning in that it was all about getting transactions authenticated and routing them, but we have grown a lot since then. We have diversified because we have learned that there is a whole financial industry that needs compliments to the original solution. So, as we have grown, we have been talking a lot with our customers to help them identify their needs and create new solutions around that. We have grown with our customers, which has allowed us to offer a wide-variety of solutions that is tailored to the industry.

NuWave: What are some of the recent trends you have seen in NonStop and how is OmniPayments adapting and diversifying to continue to meet your customers’ needs?

Jessica: These past couple of years we have concentrated a lot in growing our OmniCloudX solution. You know that customers are looking to reduce their costs and reduce their efforts to grow smoothly, and the cloud has been growing up around them and the available technology. We have combined a product that can process our customers’ transactions on a system like NonStop, but we have given them the first cloud service to do so. We bought the first NSX when they came to market, installed OmniPayments and we created OmniCloudX to offer our products on the cloud. The customer doesn't have to worry about the maintenance of the machine or the maintenance of the software. We do all that for them. We have 4 data centers between the US and South America, and we have our solutions there so we can handle everything the customer needs from there.

Initially, the cloud solution was directed mostly to customers that were small and don't really have the budget to acquire and maintain a HPE NonStop, but what we have seen in the last couple of months is that the interest in the cloud goes far beyond the smaller markets. We had a meeting with a large US retailer and they were very interested in this model. That opened our eyes that this isn't only for small customers. This is something the industry is looking for, including the big players.

NuWave: That's definitely something we have seen a lot, too. A lot of customers are moving toward the cloud and HPE is trying to come up with different options that may be a little more cost-effective for smaller or seasonal companies that don't want to invest in a HPE NonStop system. What are your plans moving forward with OmniCloudX and other cloud-based services?

Jessica: In addition to OmniCloud X, we are working on what we call "Managed Services". For example, we did an implementation in Colombia for a big bank and they had a switch to process transactions that was built on Windows and Unix platforms, so they were very limited in their growth and capabilities to process big volumes of transactions. It was also very difficult for them to implement new solutions and acquire new volume. They decided to migrate, and they reached out to OmniPayments for help with that. They had no experience in NonStop, so they decided they didn't want to go through the hassle of maintaining, operating and learning the system. They wanted to make sure their service was doing ok in production and make sure everything was being run by experts. They decided to have their own private cloud and do the managed services with us. With that, we do everything for them. We are the ones that do the administration, the maintenance, the security - everything that is involved in working with the NonStop is done by us for them. We also maintain the application and do all the development to ensure they are getting everything they need out of our OmniPayments suite. They save the headache of having to set up and learn the NonStop, and they save costs and time because we know the platform. It's also just easier and more cost effective that we run it for them. Maybe in the future they will revisit it and want to manage it on their own, but they decided for now they really want us to manage their service. That is just one example of what we do with OmniCloudX and our managed services around that.

NuWave: Having that option for remotely-managed cloud services seems to be helping out a lot of people who would otherwise have to spend a great deal of time and money on NonStop development. Did you find this to be part of the conversation at Boot Camp as well?

Jessica: Boot Camp for us was a big event this year. It was obviously very good in terms of the content, since we got to know where the industry is going and learn all about the new vNonStop and the work that is going into that. We started talking to HPE and we are going to be certifying OmniPayments with VNonStop in the near future, so we are very excited about that. We also talked to a lot of our customers at Boot Camp. They are all really interested in vNonStop, so they were very happy to learn more about all the virtualization options in NonStop as well.

We were also able to present our OmniCloudX demo at Boot Camp, which was a great achievement for us. It's important to have the opportunity to show customers what our systems can do. We did a live demo of our software, and we called this demo Thunder and Lightning. In the demo, we say OmniPayments is the thunder and the NSX is the lightning, and together they can have a lot of power. We wanted to show how they can handle large volumes of transactions, and what ended up happening was we ended up presenting our system processing 5,000 transactions per second. Initially, the goal was to process 4,000, so that was really good! Customers loved the fact that they got to see the application right there at the party we hosted. It was a great experience to get everyone together and to show exactly what our products can do.

NuWave: Aside from what you're doing with the cloud and your managed services, what's next for OmniPayments?

Jessica: This year, we are obviously going to continue to develop OmniCloudX. We still have a lot of new customers who are interested in that, so we will keep working on and improving that product for them. Other than that, we have also been focusing on growing our new fraud solution, FraudBlocker. We developed this solution throughout 2016, so we will be continuing down that path this year. We have been gathering a lot of input from customers on their needs in regards to this solution. In 2017, we will be getting OmniPayments integrated with big data solutions so we can enhance our FraudBlocker solution even more. We are working on getting to know the pattern of customer behavior for fraud to make it the best product it can be for such an important issue. It's interesting and it is a need we need to fill. Right now, fraud is really big, and with web-based transactions fraud has become even bigger, so we have to make sure our customers have the tools to accommodate that for safe and secure transactions.

We are also working on continuing to expand OmniPayments into new markets. We are working with several new customers across the US, Chile, Colombia, Argentina, Puerto Rico, and Europe, among others. We are also setting up our first OmniCloudX in Europe. We keep adding new networks, which allows us to continue to enhance our main product suite. We will continue to be reliable and we will continue to develop our solutions to meet the needs of our customers. We also have started to grow throughout Europe with dedicated team members, and we are very excited about that as well.

NuWave: It sounds like there are a lot of exciting things on the horizon for OmniPayments! Congratulations on your continued growth, and thank you for taking the time to talk with us.